Least Favorite Grind System Poll Afterthoughts

In today’s post I’d like to quickly pick up one of the polls we’ve recently run on the site as part of our new “Wisdom Checks” format. Two weeks ago we inquired about your least favorite grind system of recent mods and here are the results:

What's Your Least Favorite Grind System of Recent Mods?

Storm Kings Thunder Voninblod Empowerment (30%, 68 Votes)

Chult Hunting (24%, 56 Votes)

Sea of Moving Ice Relic Weapon Set Grind (17%, 38 Votes)

Strongholds Guild Leveling (12%, 28 Votes)

Elemental Evil 60-70 Leveling (8%, 18 Votes)

Cloaked Ascendancy Ascended Weapon Set Grind (5%, 12 Votes)

Underdark Legendary Ring Farm (4%, 10 Votes)

Total Voters: 230

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Neverwinter’s Retention Rate

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Granted, it’s not a super great sample size, but there’s still couple things I find interesting. First of all, there’s a minor tendency that players voted for newer grind system. I guess that’s partially human nature as we can recall present things much better than past ones. However I do also believe many players that witnessed the full extend of the cruel Underdark Ring grind or Elemental Evil campaign aren’t here any longer. Neverwinter’s retention rates are always rumored to be pretty weak and this adds to that sentiment. In this context it also makes sense that “Strongholds” is still the most annoying from the pre-SkT systems because it’s still a pain until today. The other systems on the contrary are outdated.

Cloaked Ascendancy Was a Great Module

I’m not surprised that the grind in Cloaked Ascendancy didn’t get many votes. It was annoying, but not as annoying that you couldn’t do it. You could even go as far as calling it fair. Since the weapons are outdated nowadays what I said above does also apply to Module 11 to some extent, but the second least votes is still a testament to a well designed grind.

Storm Kings Thunder Was a Complete Desaster

Let’s talk about the opposite next: We’ve not been shy bashing Storm Kings Thunder whenever we could around here, and we’ll continue to do so. Nearly 50% of the voters picked either Voninblod or the Mod 10.5 weapons. Maybe it wasn’t really fair to include two systems of the same module, but to be honest, no other update featured two equally gruesome grinds. This is so telling how bad SKT was and also how relieved players were when Module 11 finally rolled around.

The Perception of Hunts is Worse Than I Thought

I gotta be honest here: I didn’t think Hunts would finish in the top three. I thought SKT and some of the older systems would take the center stage. Granted, I don’t specifically love Hunts, but for whatever reason I personally enjoy circling Omu and Soshenstar River for rare mobs much more than other stuff. It’s in my daily “farm” rotation. But apparently the community thinks otherwise, which is OK. The cons are admittedly huge and the devs didn’t do themselves a big favor with this whole “hunts are a social design” bullshit and then tweaking them multiple times to make it a much less painful experience.

So yeah, I guess I just wanted to get these quick bullets off my chest. Also, glad we do this whole polling thing now. It’s an interesting aspect to the site that I definitely like!

Do you agree with my opinion or would you interpret the results differently? Share your thoughts on our social channels, in the comments below, or the corresponding thread on our message board!

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j0Shi

j0Shi plays the Neverwinter MMORPG since the open BETA in 2013 and is a regular contributor to the blog and the whole UN:Project. Originally a Guardian Fighter, he has built up ALTs of all classes and plays on BIS/near-BIS level.

5 thoughts on “Least Favorite Grind System Poll Afterthoughts”

One consideration is how skippable a grind was. Voniblood ranked high because there wasn’t away to skip it and do the module. In contrast ring grinds, somi weapons, etc could totally be skipped without impacting long term progression since we knew alternative options would be available soon.

The Stronghold grind probably didn’t get as much vote because not everyone participated in it with any focus. Most people did it as a side thing (after campaign questing was done) and did other parts in conjunction with normal activities, like farming dungeoneer shards while farming daily RAD or adventure shards while doing campaigns. Also strongholds had a buyout option from the beginning

I always find it funny that people want no content cause that means hey have to work for their results. With mod 14 we yet again get 1hour a week campaign and we now have no reason to use alts on it so that means you can just justify playing 2-3 hours a week from mod 14 . Really sad since we used to have enough content to play 2-3 hours a day.

unless you want to run the same dungeon for 4 months in a row hours at a time.

Voinblood is probably the worst though Elemental Evil’s 256 vigilance tasks was craptastic too. Hunts are not to bad, buy a stack of GMOPs and trade them for what you want, I can live with that, though there is no good reason for not being able to sell lures on the AH.

Though the lairs RNG on top of RNG from the hunts were ill advised on cryptic’s part, I found them to be one of the least bad grinds. Unlike most of the past grinds, you could actually make good AD off of the hunts in addition to progressing. I never made a single lure and instead just collected and sold the T1 lure components straight for GMOPs. I sold most of these GMOPS for AD and would occasionally use a few to purchase other player’s lures when I needed them.

I suspect the hunts scored higher in large part because that is what people are doing right now. If the grind is newer and that is what people are currently working on, their frustrations with it will be fresher in their minds than the older grinds they are no longer working on.

I think this poll is too simple to draw conclusions. There is grind in terms of time you MUST spend and then there is grind you choose to spend.

It might be possible to compare grind in terms of time: If you had to both grind Voniblod and had to grind Hunts, which do you like to do least?

Hunts are really bad if you think you need the pieces dropped from the final hunt. It’s brutal to even get to one tier-3 hunt, let alone several. Farming Underdark for a specific ring is also super frustrating. And both of these are ridiculous when the very next module probably introduces a better item (perhaps a month after you finally farm what you need).

Hunts are fantastic if you just want some decent gear or to get some salvage with friends with the pieces that happened to drop for you. That’s almost no grind at all – it’s basically a bonus!

Some things feel really dumb. Voningblod feels super-dumb as a system. Running around a zone and not fighting anything, just picking up treasures that don’t do anything else for you… that feels really unrewarding.

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